chapter eight

When Jill had met Tara she’d been given the job she now possessed but she had been rash and naïve at the time. One of the first real distress calls that year had been made by Oralia at the quiet hours between night and morning. It had lasted four and a half hours. Oralia had called her and evaded the fact that the girl who answered the phone worked for a help-line. She chatted away like it wasn’t the middle of the night and Jill was simply an old friend; she almost had Jill believing it too. In fact, the subject she pursued off the bat was the weather that day. Jill hadn’t been prepared for anything quite like that and tried her best to roll with it for a while. After almost an hour of idle jabber Oralia burst out that her husband had just beat the cheer out of her and she couldn’t move her right hand without starbursts of pain shooting up and own her arm. Then she went on to tell Jill not to worry for she was holding the phone with her left.
At first Jill launched into orders to call the police and “leave the bastard” but quickly it was that Oralia clammed up and would no longer speak until Jill stopped and promised her she wouldn’t do anything like that, as much as it hurt to say it. Then they began talking about Oralia’s past and how her dad used to abuse her. She openly admitted that both men were in the wrong and she knew she shouldn’t let it happen for she made no excuses for either of them but still she stayed. Eventually she let it be known that the only reason it had changed was because she was now pregnant. While she was very shy and unsure of everything else she said she knew beyond even her doubts that she would be a wonderful mother and she grasped hope in the form of an infant. She called then because she was worried for her baby’s welfare.
They talked for a while longer and Jill was once again bringing around the prospect of escape, this time with more success, when there was a bong on the other line and Oralia stopped dead. She must have dropped the phone then because while she was gone the connection was intact. The phone was off the hook. Jill heard the awful sounds of a man yelling and the frantic bell of Oralia trying to calm him when the first SNAAAAAP sounded and another thud ensued in the background: the sound of Oralia hitting the floor. Just as surely something snapped within Jill and she got up and calmly walked out of the building to her colleagues’ confusion. She had been able to wrench Oralia’s address from her and now she jumped into her truck and drove there. In the glove box lay a 9mm pistol she had bought months before.
It was only around a ten-minute drive and when she arrived she armed herself and walked to the door, breaking a panel when she found it locked and letting herself in. She ground them in the living room; him standing over a cowering her brandishing his fist and talking softly but saying things only a madman could believe. And so she shot him.
After the ringing died down only silence could be heard. The woman looked equally as shocked as the wounded man and they shared a look of amazement before staring at Jill with identical expressions of disbelief. It was like a poorly acted vaudeville act. Jill had aimed and succeeded in shooting him in the shoulder so as only to stop him and that she did. He staggered in the sudden, searing pain and involuntary tears sprang out from his eyelids. An odd contrast juxtaposed to the dry-eyed and bleeding woman. He wobbled over to the nearby couch and fell into it before he finally looked up at Jill with seething rage and a murderous look in his watery eyes. Before he spoke Jill took over the conversation with a simple, “Don’t talk Asshole.”
And he didn’t. Instead he followed her close behind with his eyes as she walked over to Oralia and helped her to her feet. She cleaned the drying blood covering her face and hands in silence and during this she happened to put down her gun. The moment her hand cleared it the man on the couch lunged at her and had her at his mercy with no notice at all. She was on her stomach and was entirely weighted down by his body covering hers. He fluctuated dizzily between whaling on the back of her head and back to whispering vulgar, unspeakable acts to come in her ears while obscenely slobbering all over her earlobe causing a nauseating mass to rise in her abdomen. Next thing she knew there was something wet sliding down her cheek and everything ceased to do anything. She dared a glance behind her and found her assailant keeled over her unmoving, the end of a bullet nested in his ear. Turned out Oralia wouldn’t be forgotten.
She was, however, a mess. Jill had just been pinned under a dead man and here she was trying her best to calm a riled and pregnant young girl. Young yet older than herself. They called the cops and Jill stayed with her throughout it all, even the timeless minutes of soundlessness.
A clause in the law system allows a battered woman the right of self-defense even when a corpse comes out of the situation but Jill had to sit through some countless lectures on the correct conduct of help-line officials. They couldn’t convince Jill for during this Oralia was rushed to the hospital with a broken rib, a fractured wrist, many contusions and abrasions, and possible internal bleeding. She hadn’t shed a tear.